Henryk Sienkiewicz, obrazy i Quo vadis

The paper discusses how the concept of “image” functions in the writing of Henryk Sienkiewicz. The author of Quo vadis, the novel honoured by a Nobel prize, has been depicted as a “worshipper of images”, both concrete images: works of art, views of nature, as well as the form of description typical of that epoch: literary image. Literary images were composed with the “painter-like” usage of language, a method which aimed to create in the reader's imagination some definite visual images. They also served to bring to mind the past and, directly, to organize the literary material. This was owing to their moment-like character: the static episode was shown in one temporal moment, and to their course in time: the sequence of images, a cycle that shows events extended in time. The examples cited here to support the above theses are derived from Sienkiewicz's letters, critical enunciations and literary works. The criterium for their selection was a willingness to point at the manner in which the author of Quo vadis understood antiquity. The writer was well-versed in the artistic output of his contemporary academic painters, and many times exploited the manner in which they perceived the ancient times, especially apparent are the relationships between Sienkiewicz and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Henryk Siemiradzki (the latter was his intimate friend). Ancient Greece was for the creator of Diokles a cradle of civilization, while Rome served mainly his historiophilosophical reflections, being a synonym of pagan, materialistic civilization, therefore doomed to perdition. The paper discussed also the genesis of Quo vadis, the manner in which the novel was written and which was close to the romantic “aesthetic of a passage”, for which the concept of image and imagery thinking was essential. A separate part of the paper is devoted to the illustrations to Quo vadis, the illustrations which depict only those scenes of the novel which not only concern its plot but also visually dominate in the text. Particular attention has been devoted to such figures as Piotr Stachiewicz and Jan Styka. The paper closes with a conclusion that both the writing of Sienkiewicz himself and many, directly or indirectly linked with his work, painters and illustrators, manifest how vivid was the idea of correspondence between arts in the 19th century. This idea could be incorporated mainly through paintings, being one of the basic categories that functioned in the epoch, both artistic and cognitive.